NASA's Curiosity: life was possible on Mars

NASA's Curiosity: life was possible on Mars

This photograph taken by Curiosity, is the clearest photograph of Mars ever taken.

NASA is taking the fiction out of science fiction with red planet rover Curiosity reporting on Tuesday that life was once sustainable there, according to SPACE.com.

Whether or not life actually did exist there at any point is still open to conjecture, but Curiosity's work certainly adds to the possibility.

Scientists on Tuesday said Curiosity found chemical and compound support for the kind of environment that would enable microbial life, reported CBS News.

"The key thing here is an environment a microbe could have lived in and might have even prospered in," NASA's John Grotzinger of the Mars Science Laboratory told reporters, said CBS.

He also said "we have found a habitable environment that is so benign and supportive of life that probably if this water was around and you had been on the planet, you would have been able to drink it," according to CBS.

Curiosity landed on Mars seven months ago in order to pursue this very question, according to SPACE.

The rover bored a two-inch hole in red planet rock last month and took soil samples, analysis of which featured in the findings announced on Tuesday, said SPACE.